After major declines in academic performance, Indiana launches student-success dashboard for students, teachers

(The Center Square) – Indiana Department of Education launched a student-success dashboard to give students and educators a clearer view of each student’s progress toward graduation.

The Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed Dashboard, nicknamed Indiana GPS, was developed over the course of a year in response to House Enrolled Act 1514, passed in 2021, which directed the State Board of Education and the DOE to develop a dashboard creating transparency for multiple student success indicators not later than July 2024.

The dashboard visually displays the progress of the state, each school district and each school in developing the student characteristics that indicate readiness for post-high school success –academic mastery, career and postsecondary readiness, communication and collaboration, work ethic, and civil, financial and digital literacy.

Those characteristics are tracked through 12 indicators for K-8 students and another dozen for students in grades 9-12.

The unveiling of the dashboard comes two months after the release of The Nation’s Report Card, which indicated Indiana’s fourth- and eighth-grade students have continued a years’ long decline in math and reading proficiency, averaging scores that were below proficiency but slightly ahead of national averages.

In August the state announced a $111 million spending program aimed at achieving 95% reading proficiency among Hoosier third-graders in five years. Third-grade reading proficiency, as measured by the IREAD-3 assessment, peaked at 91.4% a decade ago. Currently, 1 in 5 children completing third grade cannot read.

The spending program includes up to $85 million from Lilly Endowment and $26 million in federal dollars provided by the American Rescue Plan to implement a science-based approach to teaching reading.